plasticspoon wrote on May 14, 2021 at 9:59 PM

Reply to comment by humanispherian in Margins and Problems: Disquisitions and Demands by humanispherian

I struggled with reading both of these, they seemed quite alien. I will have to give it another try later.

It might be worthwhile to ask, what does prefiguration look like to mutualists (as distinct from non-market left-critique anarchists.

humanispherian OP wrote on May 24, 2021 at 11:03 PM

The real difficulty with the Proudhonian material is that there is a whole toolkit to master and anarchists haven't done much of that work over the years. The theory of collective force is the rationale behind "property is theft," a notion that presumably nearly all anarchists agree with, but even those of us who are pretty committed to this kind of anarchist analysis may still feel like beginners when it comes to translating its terms into, say, the terms used by anarchist communists.

I'm honestly still wrestling with what prefiguration can really mean for anarchists, given the rather fluid nature of what we might hope to prefigure. It's a question I've been wrestling with in my notebooks lately, but I can't claim to have come to any very firm conclusions.

(And apologies for the delay in responding. It's been a heck of a week.)

gone_to_croatan wrote on May 25, 2021 at 10:06 AM

About the prefiguration bit, I think this means for me being able to apply some of the anarchic conclusions in my daily life, more concrete in my relationships and it's dynamics. You are by far more theory conscious than me so probably you are in a more deeply quest for prefigurative anarchy.

I could be using this concept all wrong, but the first time I came with this was the foulcaltian biopolitics. For me relationships, friendships, parenting and pedagogy are the experimental ground for what I understand for prefiguration.

humanispherian OP wrote on May 25, 2021 at 8:01 PM

I think you're right in your understanding of prefiguration. I'm just at a funny place in my understanding of anarchism. "Constructing Anarchisms" is, for me, all about putting what I think I know to the test, so that I can perhaps talk a bit more confidently on the other side about some of these practical issues. A number of these questions suddenly have, for me, all sorts of new wrinkles to smooth out.